The Steel City is a Great Getaway

“When I say beautiful Pittsburgh, I mean beautiful Pittsburgh,” clarified Peter Sagal, host of the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me after greeting a caller from “beautiful Pittsburgh.” “Nobody told me how gorgeous that city is,” he added. “It’s like you’re keeping it a secret.” Modern-day Pittsburgh, Sagal concluded, is “like Oz with a bad baseball team.”

Without stipulation or sarcasm, it can be said that Pittsburgh is a city of beauty. (Yes, we mean Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.) The one-time Steel City may be the only metropolis in the Rust Belt better off than it was 40 years ago (back when it was known for its steel mills, smog and rapid population shrinkage). Pittsburgh has reinvented itself as a hotbed for education, research and health care, and that has allowed it to reinvest in infrastructure and keep vacancy and decay at bay. Pittsburgh now has enough jewels hidden in its fabric to make it prime for a weekend getaway.

The best, most romantic thing to do when seeing Pittsburgh is to see Pittsburgh. The gorgeous skyline, a mishmash of buildings from several eras, reveals myriad bridges stretching out across the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers as they form the Ohio at the triangular downtown, the tip of which is marked by a gushing water fountain. The best view comes from Mt. Washington, a steep hill that looks down on downtown, as if it had been angled as a place where postcard photos would be taken. The two inclines that travel up and down the hill are local icons and no visit is complete without a ride on one.

For a view that reveals some more details of the city, head to Kayak Pittsburgh. From May through October, this nonprofit rents boats (single seaters and tandems) and launches them from beneath the Roberto Clemente Bridge. You can paddle past Pittsburgh’s two state-of-the-art sports stadiums, Heinz Field and PNC Park, and alongside the World War II-era submarine stationed outside the Carnegie Science Center. It makes for a great afternoon, even if we’d prefer not to think of what lay in the long-neglected river bottoms (probably still debris from the Flood of 1936).

But downtown is only the fountainhead of Pittsburgh. Also worth a view are some of its neighborhoods. The South Side is the center of city nightlife, with an establishment for every taste (dance clubs, dives, sports dens, hipster bars with vegan appetizers, etc.) With its weekend buskers, it has a boardwalk feel, epitomized by Games ’N At, a ’90s-style video arcade, complete with air hockey and foosball. It’s the perfect place to recreate a piece of the mall dates of your adolescence. Lawrenceville, deemed “the Williamsburg of Pittsburgh” by the hipsters at the website Gawker, is home to Arsenal Lanes, one of the most ornate bowling allies in the country (with its purple-strewn interior design scheme and DJ nights). The Strip District makes an interesting shopping experience for its random spatterings of shops. An outlet for discount sneakers sits next to an espresso joint, which is alongside a place that sells a dozen or so varieties of popcorn because why not?

If glimpsing some art is more your and your companion’s idea of taking in the scenery, Pittsburgh’s top cultural institution is, hands down, the Andy Warhol Museum. Inside is several million dollars’ worth of work by Pittsburgh’s most famous native son — including, yes, those soup can paintings he did — and it also has a rotating repertoire of Warhol’s patience-demanding films. (The man didn’t like to edit his footage.) A few blocks away, the Mattress Factory features new work by living artists (at the site of an actual former mattress factory). Lastly, next to the University of Pittsburgh, sits a cluster of museums, including the Carnegie museums of art and natural history, the latter of which is known for its collection of dinosaur fossils.

Where to go in Pittsburgh at dinner time? Despite its reputation as a working-class, pizza-and-beer kind of town, some foodie-baiting restaurants have sprung up in the last few years. Avenue B is known for its seasonal menu and daily specials outlined on the chalkboard outside its cozy location. Cure is acclaimed for its preparation of meats, even less common ones. (These people know what to do with a duck carcass, apparently.) Tamuri attempts the bold trick of Latin-Asian fusion cuisine and is the perfect place to pass around small plates. In the summer months, the definitive can’t-miss of Pittsburgh’s dining scene is Pusadee’s Garden, for both its masterful Thai cuisine and its outdoor seating in an actual garden, one where the sunlight always seems to shine perfectly.

And Pittsburgh does love its more casual dining options. With its huge Polish population, pierogies are a favorite. Debating which place has the best is like debating which year’s Steelers had the best offense — it could go on indefinitely — but the top contenders are the S&D Polish Deli, Szmidt’s Old World Deli and the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern. In the last few years, the city has fallen in love with Franktuary, a joint where you can get a hot dog in dozens of different styles (Buffalo, with wing sauce and a side of blue cheese; Texas, with jalapenos and cheddar; Bangkok, with peanut sauce and shredded carrots, etc.) Of course, Pittsburgh’s signature meal is the sandwich of Primanti Brothers, the Strip District diner. In the ’30s, Joe Primanti got the idea to stick every component of a lunch — coleslaw, fries, your choice of meat — between the two pieces of bread that bookend a sandwich. Pittsburghers have been wolfing these things down ever since. As classy as the city has become, we will keep it real and admit that if Pittsburgh were a country, this deservedly would be served in its section of the It’s a Small World Restaurant at Disney.